Severn Teackle Wallis
“Awake! and to horse, my brothers!
For the dawn is glimmering gray;
And hark! in the crackling brushwood
There are feet that tread this way.
“Who cometh?” “A friend.” “What tidings?”
“O God! I sicken to tell,
For the earth seems earth no longer,
And its sights are sights of hell!
“There’s rapine and fire and slaughter,
From the mountain down to the shore;
There’s blood on the trampled harvest–
There’s blood on the homestead floor.
“From the far-off conquered cities
Comes the voice of a stifled wail;
And the shrieks and moans of the houseless
Ring out, like a dirge, on the gale.
“I’ve seen, from the smoking village
Our mothers and daughters fly;
I’ve seen where the little children
Sank down, in the furrows, to die.
“On the banks of the battle-stained river
I stood, as the moonlight shone,
And it glared on the face of my brother,
As the sad wave swept him on.
“Where my home was glad, are ashes,
And horror and shame had been there–
For I found, on the fallen lintel,
This tress of my wife’s torn hair.
“They are turning the slave upon us,
And, with more than the fiend’s worst art,
Have uncovered the fires of the savage
That slept in his untaught heart.
“The ties to our hearths that bound him,
They have rent, with curses, away,
And maddened him, with their madness,
To be almost as brutal as they.
“With halter and torch and Bible,
And hymns to the sound of the drum,
They preach the gospel of Murder,
And pray for Lust’s kingdom to come.
“To saddle! to saddle! my brothers!
Look up to the rising sun,
And ask of the God who shines there,
Whether deeds like these shall be done!
“Wherever the vandal cometh,
Press home to his heart with your steel,
And when at his bosom you cannot,
Like the serpent, go strike at his heel!
“Through thicket and wood go hunt him,
Creep up to his camp fireside,
And let ten of his corpses blacken
Where one of our brothers hath died.
“In his fainting, foot-sore marches,
In his flight from the stricken fray,
In the snare of the lonely ambush,
The debts that we owe him pay,
“In God’s hand, alone, is judgment;
But He strikes with the hands of men,
And His blight would wither our manhood
If we smote not the smiter again.
“By the graves where our fathers slumber,
By the shrines where our mothers prayed,
By our homes and hopes and freedom.
Let every man swear on his blade.–
“That he will not sheath nor stay it,
Till from point to heft it glow
With the flush of Almighty vengeance,
In the blood of the felon foe.”
They swore–and the answering sunlight
Leapt red from their lifted swords,
And the hate in their hearts made echo
To the wrath in their burning words.
There’s weeping in all New England,
And by Schuylkill’s banks a knell,
And the widows there, and the orphans,
How the oath was kept can tell.
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
This poem is written to provoke motion. From its opening call to arms, it refuses stillness or reflection. Everything in it pushes toward urgency, toward the idea that delay itself is a kind of moral failure. The voice is not contemplative or uncertain; it is meant to rouse, to harden resolve, and to turn outrage into action. The poem works less as a record of events than as a speech shaped into verse.
The speaker builds his case through accumulation. Each reported scene escalates the sense of violation: burned homes, dead children, raped women, drowned brothers. These are not lingered over for emotional nuance; they are stacked one on top of another to overwhelm the listener. The intent is not to understand suffering but to justify retaliation. By the time the catalog ends, the reader is meant to feel that restraint is no longer possible or even moral.
A key move in the poem is the way it frames responsibility. Violence is presented as having been forced upon the speakers. They are not choosing war; war has come to them, invaded their homes, and corrupted their land. This framing allows the poem to cast vengeance as defense and brutality as obligation. Even the most extreme commands—ambush, hunting, killing ten for one—are presented as debts owed rather than acts freely chosen.
Religion plays a central role in this justification. God is repeatedly invoked, not as a source of mercy or judgment in the abstract, but as a force that acts through human violence. The poem draws a clear line: divine judgment exists, but it is carried out by men with swords. In this logic, refusing to strike back is not an act of moral restraint but a betrayal of both faith and masculinity. Manhood itself is said to wither if violence is not returned in kind.
The poem’s language reinforces this narrowing of moral space. The enemy is never individualized or humanized. They are vandals, fiends, serpents, felons. These labels flatten the opposing side into something less than human, making mercy seem absurd and compassion dangerous. Once that transformation is complete, the poem can move comfortably into calls for extermination without needing to argue for them.
What is striking is how little room the poem leaves for doubt. Grief exists, but only as fuel. Sorrow is quickly converted into rage, and rage into oath. The final image of raised swords catching the red sunlight turns the men into a single collective will. Individual judgment disappears. The oath matters more than the people who swear it.
The closing stanza shifts perspective outward, pointing to distant regions filled with widows and orphans. This is one of the few moments where consequence enters the poem, but it does so obliquely. The suffering is acknowledged, yet it is framed as proof that the oath was carried out, not as something that might complicate the righteousness of that oath. Loss becomes evidence, not warning.
As a war poem, this piece is valuable less for what it reveals about combat and more for what it reveals about wartime psychology. It shows how fear, grief, faith, and identity can be fused into a single argument for total violence. There is no interest here in aftermath, reconciliation, or moral residue. The poem captures the moment when a community convinces itself that cruelty is not only permitted, but sacred.